Lily Maclaughlin

Name: Lily Maclaughlin

Gender: Female

Age: 18

Grade: Senior

School: Bayview Secondary School

Hobbies and Interests: journalism, photography, dance

Appearance: Lily has the wiry form of someone who never properly filled out, although her parents have speculated she's just late in blooming. She's relatively tall at 5'9", and while a few years of dance has given her a bit of muscle to round herself out, Lily is still lanky at around 133 lbs. Lily's face is somewhat round, in contrast to her angular body, with a pair of lips having a fullness she inherited from her mother. Her hair is kept trimmed around her shoulders and more often than not tied into a loose ponytail. Her natural hair color is a cornflower blonde, but she keeps it dyed brown. Her eyes are her father's, a hazel that changes colors depending on the season. Lily isn't adverse to making herself look nice with occasional touches of makeup here and there, though it's not a particularly common occurrence.

Lily's choice of dress leans toward the nondescript, favoring darker blues and greys. She prefers jeans, and favors button down shirts and the occasional blouse with matching half-jacket as normal attire.

Biography: On the school grounds, Lily seems affable, friendly, not above depreciating herself for the sake of humor on occasion, and always has a smile handy for people. This isn't a front, by any means, but people still sometimes have reason to be on their guard around her. As a member of the student newspaper and a rather adamant staff writer, her presence sometimes makes people bite their tongues. With her ever-present tape recorder and notebook occasionally accompanied by a battered Olympus E-510 DSLR camera, Lily takes her extracurricular duty seriously, always looking for potential stories.

Lily was born to Michael and Denise Maclaughlin. Her father was a Minnesota native, while her mother had been coming off of three years living in Ohio. While her father was a fairly unremarkable, albeit well-liked, mechanic, her mother was a cynical career journalist. There was no question both parents loved Lily, as she was their only child, her mother's job on a big daily periodical kept her from paying her child as much attention as she would have liked. She managed to see her child enough to impart on her a desire to pursue the same profession. Lily's father managed to keep her from growing resentful toward her mother, made her understand she did what she did both to support the family and in some small part to help the world in her own way. Still, Lily grew up wishing her mother could have been more attentive to her.

As she grew, Lily made it a point to learn ways of the inverted pyramid, minimalistic writing, and solid reporting. She used to practice writing print stories as early as 12, taking little bits of gossip and things she learned from her family and writing them up as mini articles. She found it wasn't too hard to get information as long as you were polite and easy to talk to, and these were traits her father, a man who never had problems talking with people, managed to pass down to her. She also gained an interest in photography, as she found fascination in the idea of capturing moments a frame at a time. Her father, of course, encouraged her in whatever she did. He was the one who also suggested she tried dance as a more physical activity, which she tried at 15 and continued to do since then.

However, even as Lily grew up, her mother still wasn't a fixture in her life, and soon Lily was starting to feel like she didn't matter. This didn't stop Lily from pursuing journalism, as secretly she hoped that by doing well in her mother's profession, she would finally get the woman to take notice of her daughter. Lily joined the high school newspaper as a freshman, and showed a zeal for it that seemed professional for a fresh prospect. Lily managed to keep herself doing well in school as she tackled her duties on the paper; this was for the sake of her father who, while fairly easy in his ways, only hoped she would do well in her education.

Because of her participation in the paper, she hasn't found herself in any particular group of friends, more likely to flit around the edge and speak to people when they might have useful information. Ostensibly she says this is to "avoid conflicts of interest", but in reality she's somewhat afraid that being involved with people will deter her from her duties.

None of it seemed to matter, because once Lily reached high school her mother's workload seemed to increase as she started to take on a new city life beat along with her normal investigative reporting with the layoff of one of her daily's writers. With her mother seemingly unreachable, Lily has been growing despondent as of late, hoping to find some kind of story that would be so big that if she managed to break it, her mother would have to take notice.

Advantages: Dance has given her some measure of stamina and strength, though she won't be fighting anyone off or running for long periods of time. She has little problem talking to people, so forming alliances certainly isn't out of the question for her.

Disadvantages: As mentioned before, she's got no fighting experience, not even generally getting into schoolyard fights. She might have a hard time killing anyone, as she's only ever wanted to cover news, not become it. She might be distrusted because of her slight reputation back in school as a pain-in-the ass journalist.

Designated Number: Female student no. 097

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Designated Weapon: A paperback copy of The American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers

Conclusion: New flash: G097's fodder. She's nosy, and that's a great way to get killed, especially when you can't fight your way out of a paper bag. At least she'll probably make the headlines. And there's no way her mom won't pay attention to her now.

'The above biography is as written by Outfoxd. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.'

Evaluations
Handled by: Outfoxd

Kills: None

Killed By: Jacqueline Myrie

Collected Weapons: A paperback copy of The American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers (assigned weapon)

Allies: Miranda Merchant, Sarah Atwell

Enemies: Sarah Atwell

Mid-game Evaluation:

Post-Game Evaluation:

Memorable Quotes:

Other/Trivia

 * Outfoxd has a minor in Journalism and was a former staff writer on the U of M-Flint newspaper, and Lily was the result of wanting to use that experience for a character.

Threads
Below is a list of threads that contain Lily, in chronological order.

Pre-Game:
 * Shutterbug
 * In The Park

V4:
 * No News is Good News
 * Hearing is Believing
 * Jesus Loves the Little Children

Your Thoughts
''Whether you were a fellow handler in SOTF or just an avid reader of the site, we'd like to know what you thought about Lily Maclaughlin. What did you like, or dislike, about the character? Let us know here!''
 * Lily was pretty good. It was fun to read someone going crazy in a way that didn't involve killing everybody, and Lily's style is a nice riff on journalistic writing. My one complaint would be that Lily didn't get to do much. She traveled with a small group, it imploded into violence, and she ran off and threw herself at another group so they'd kill her. It's all well-executed, but Lily had a lot more potential. I think she was the right one to die early, though, since Ray went on to do so much cool stuff. - MurderWeasel